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Former customers of Peregrine Financial Group Inc., the brokerage firm that collapsed after the exposure of its founder's fraud, are in line to recover more of the $394 million they are owed, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Bankruptcy trustee Ira Bodenstein wants to distribute up to $34 million to Peregrine's commodities futures customers based in the U.S. and abroad, the third such distribution since the Iowa brokerage's 2012 collapse. Bodenstein, who is in charge of picking up the pieces for a brokerage firm that fell apart once founder Russell Wasendorf Sr. was found to have stolen millions of dollars in customer funds, has to date returned about $159 million to the futures customers.

The former managers of Forest Oaks Country Club skimmed money from their company long after it was broke, a bankruptcy trustee says in a new lawsuit filed this week, News and Record reported yesterday. The owners of Raleigh, N.C.-based ES2 Sports & Leisure siphoned money for their personal use — including a student loan payment and a satellite television bill, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, claims that Matthew Birely, David Hess and George Hess took a combined $166,711 from their company. Charles Ivey, the trustee for ES2’s bankruptcy case, filed the lawsuit Tuesday and wants the money, plus punitive damages, to pay ES2’s creditors. ES2 managed the country club and golf course in southeast Guilford County for about a year from 2013 to 2014. It became insolvent in August 2013, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Five former Madoff colleagues face sentencing beginning Dec. 8 for using a web of fake account documents, phony regulatory filings and bogus computer programs to keep the scheme afloat for decades, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The three men and two women who joined Madoff’s New York-based investment advisory firm as early as the 1960s have been free on bail since a federal jury in March found them guilty of securities fraud and related counts. It was a total victory for prosecutors in the first criminal trial over the scam. U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who oversaw the five-month trial in Manhattan, will hand down sentences over a week-long period. She repeatedly delayed the hearings as lawyers squabbled over details of the case, including how much money the former staffers should be ordered to forfeit.

Six years after Bernard Madoff’s fraud collapsed, the cost of liquidating his defunct investment advisory firm to repay thousands of victims has topped $1 billion, though the con man’s former customers aren’t footing the bill, according to a Bloomberg News analysis on Friday. The fees, paid by the industry-backed Securities Investor Protection Corp. (SIPC), which is managing the case, have financed a team of lawyers who this week surpassed $10 billion in recoveries for victims, or almost 60 percent of the principal that vanished after Madoff’s arrest in December 2008. Irving Picard, the bankruptcy lawyer who’s leading the effort as trustee for Madoff’s company, included the new fee total in an interim report posted yesterday on his website. A bankruptcy judge in Manhattan regularly approves the fees, sometimes over the objections of victims’ groups. The victims, who lost $17.5 billion in principal, have been paid back almost $6 billion by Picard since he started distributing the recovered funds. Billions more are being held in reserve until lawsuits by victims seeking larger payouts are resolved. The last distribution, about $349 million, was in May.

Six years after Bernard Madoff’s fraud collapsed, the cost of liquidating his defunct investment advisory firm to repay thousands of victims has topped $1 billion, though the con man’s former customers aren’t footing the bill, Bloomberg News reported today. The fees, paid by the industry-backed Securities Investor Protection Corp., which is managing the case, have financed a team of lawyers who this week surpassed $10 billion in recoveries for victims, or almost 60 percent of the principal that vanished after Madoff’s arrest in December 2008. Irving Picard, the bankruptcy lawyer who’s leading the effort as trustee for Madoff’s company, included the new fee total in an interim report posted yesterday on his website. A bankruptcy judge in Manhattan regularly approves the fees, sometimes over the objections of victims’ groups. The victims, who believed their investments were used to buy securities, have been paid almost $6 billion by Picard since he started distributing the recovered funds. The last distribution, about $349 million, was in May.

An investment fund that parked all of its money with Bernard Madoff has agreed to give up $95 million for the benefit of Madoff's victims in the second major settlement announced this week by the court-appointed official tracking down money tied to the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The settlement with Senator Fund SPC, announced yesterday, follows a $497 million deal announced on Monday that will collect money from Herald Fund SPC and Primeo Fund, two other funds that invested with Madoff, who is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence. Both deals are subject to bankruptcy court approval.

A new legal settlement will bring in nearly $500 million for Bernard Madoff's cheated investors, putting their total recovery to date above $10 billion, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Irving Picard, the court-appointed official tracking down funds stolen in the largest Ponzi scheme ever, on Monday announced that two investment funds — Herald Fund SPC and Primeo Fund — have agreed to return $497 million they received by investing with Madoff. The deal brings the total funds recovered in the liquidation of Madoff's investment firm to more than $10.3 billion, of which nearly $6 billion has been returned to investors. Investors lost $17.3 billion in principal upon the 2008 collapse of Madoff's Ponzi scheme, for which he is now serving a 150-year prison sentence.

Dallas-based billionaire Sam Wyly has filed for bankruptcy after he was ordered by the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay anywhere from $200 million to $455 million for his involvement in a massive offshore fraud scheme that netted him and his brother more than $550 million, MLive.com reported today. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in September that Wyly and his late brother Charles Wyly, Jr. were involved in a 13-year fraud in which the two created 17 trusts and 40 subsidiary companies before hiring a team of lawyers and an offshore accountant to hold records outside the U.S. The SEC outlines a system of trusts in the Isle of Man that Business Insider reports have earned the brothers, the one-time owners of the arts and crafts retail chain Michael Stores Inc., $553 million in untaxed profits over a decade of hidden trades in four companies that they controlled. Scheindlin said that the judgment against Wyly and his brother's estate is among the largest ever imposed against individuals. Sam Wyly made Forbes' list of the 400-richest Americans in 2010 with a net worth of $1 billion. The $455 million figure is the result of $195 million owed plus interest payments.

A former low-level employee at the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf will be tried separately on criminal charges arising from the collapse of the once-mighty New York firm and not stand trial with three of its former top executives, The New York Times Dealbook reported on Friday. A New York State judge ruled on Friday that Zachary Warren, who was a client-relations manager at the 1,300-lawyer firm and has since become a lawyer, will be tried after the main defendants. Those defendants are accused of masterminding a scheme to use accounting gimmicks to mask the precarious state of Dewey’s finances on the eve of the financial crisis. The decision sets the stage for two back-to-back criminal trials over the events leading up to Dewey’s bankruptcy filing in December 2012, which cost investors in the firm as much $200 million. This year, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, stunned the New York legal community by announcing a 106-count indictment against Dewey’s former top executives — Steven H. Davis, Dewey’s former chairman; Stephen DiCarmine, the firm’s onetime executive director; and Joel Sanders, the firm’s former chief financial officer. At the same time, he announced that his office had secured guilty pleas from seven former employees of the firm, many of whom once worked in Dewey’s finance and accounting department.

A Texas man was arrested yesterday and charged with running a bitcoin Ponzi scheme that in its height accounted for about 7 percent of the virtual currency in public circulation, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney said, according to a Wall Street Journal report today. Trendon Shavers, under the alias pirateat40, raised more than 760,000 bitcoins in investments through his firm, Bitcoin Savings and Trust, from at least Sept. 2011 to Sept. 2012, according to court documents. The investments were valued at more than $4.5 million based on the price of a bitcoin during the scheme. Shavers has been charged with one count of securities fraud, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $5 million, and wire fraud, carrying a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. In September, Shavers was fined more than $40 million and ordered to pay a civil penalty of $150,000 in relation to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit. Shavers sold bitcoin-related securities from his home in McKinney, Tex., promising investors up to 7 percent in weekly interest. In the end, at least 48 of about 100 investors lost all or part of their investment, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.